Angry Birds costing businesses $1.5 billion in productivity loss

When Alex Madrigal, writer for The Atlantic, saw a report that said people play 200 million minutes of Angry Birds on smartphones every day, he decided to try to figure out what affect that had on business productivity. Using the same methodology that consulting firms like Challenger, Gray, and Christmas use to find the affect such things as fantasy football and March Madness have on business costs, he put the admittedly unscientific numbers to work. The results are staggering.

According to his humorous calculations, people playing Angry Birds at work costs American businesses over $1.5 billion in lost wages. He estimates that 5% of the total minutes played are Americans at work and multiplied it by the annual salary of the average smartphone user. Even though there are quite a few liberties taken with devising the numbers, as someone who is guilty of this infraction at work myself, I totally believe that Madrigal's not too far off. But ask yourself this, if these people weren't busy playing Angry Birds, would they actually be spending that time working? I don't think so.